Milla Jovovitch's killer couture

1. “Resident Evil” (2002)
“I had a strong vision of what I wanted Alice to wear, so I drew it. She’s lost her memory, but we get the feeling that this dress had been laid out to go to dinner and then she passed out and then whatever happened in that facility happened, and she wakes up and finds this evening dress on the bed. At the time I was really obsessed with Galliano, and I was wearing a lot of Galliano, and I loved how he was using chiffon and how girly his things looked. I was also thinking of Asian films, where women would wear these flowy dresses but still fought. So it was the idea of an evening gown that was also kind of a battle suit. The asymmetry came from the fact that it needed to be open so she could fight, and would be able to move around.”

Columbia/courtesy Everett Collection

2. “Resident Evil: Retribution” (2012)
“We said, why are we trying to reinvent the wheel with Alice in these quirky, weird costumes? We’ve been trying so hard to get away from [the look of] the game. And that’s when we came up with the black catsuit, which is very ‘Mission: Impossible.’ Ninjas wear black catsuits. But then, of course, how would we make it different? We’re not just going to have me in black and be happy with that. We saw some snowboarding gear and thought, these buckles are amazing. So we used that to make it almost like an exoskeleton.”

3. “The Fifth Element” (1997)
“Luc [Besson] and I started talking about what Leeloo was going to wear, and we came up with the idea that she needs to be covered up but they also need to inject her, because she’s like a lab rat. It had to be revealing enough to believe they could stick a needle in her wherever. So we said it had to be kind of medical and then [Jean Paul] Gaultier, who designed all the costumes for the film, came up with the bandages.”

4. “Resident Evil: Extinction” (2007)
“In this one, Alice is on her own in the desert. It’s so hot you’d think you would wear less, but clothes actually keep you cooler. But we didn’t want her to be totally covered up. So we came up with the idea for this shirt that had gotten ripped and then tied back together into these garters. And then we had, from our own line, this beautiful pair of shorts with a star on the back that nobody had bought! So we thought, why don’t we use these shorts in the movie? Coincidentally, in the ‘Resident Evil’ gaming world, there’s this team called the S.T.A.R.S. — it stands for something [Special Tactics and Rescue Service]. So I thought that would be cool.”

Photo Credit: Van Redin

6. “The Three Musketeers” (2011)
“The first costume I saw for Milady was pants, and immediately I went, ‘Eh.’ We’ve seen this — of course, a woman in a period piece who fights, she’s got to wear pants. So I went to the library and got a bunch of art books and looked at Dutch art, because it’s so strong and so graphic. I thought, I want to see this woman come alive from a painting, to pull out a sword and kill people. I don’t want to see her change into pants. I want to see this woman in court with her beautiful dress, how much more constrained she is by it — that she could be a warrior wearing this outfit made her even stronger.”

Everett Collection/Everett Collection

5. “Return to the Blue Lagoon” (1991)
“That bikini was kind of my strong point in this movie, because I was a horrible actress! It was my first foray into costume design. I remember meeting the costume designer and talking about what [my character] would wear, and we thought, fish skin. So we got all these samples of fish-skin-type fabric and that spurred the costume. Which is probably the most memorable thing about that movie.”